Yvonne Jonsson memorial, 27 Nov 2019, Colombo. Photo taken by author. (I was asked by the family and friends of Yvonne Jonsson to share some thoughts on the evening of a memorial for her, organized in Colombo. Below is the slightly edited transcript of that short address. Here is a statement by women’s rights activists for additional context.) [Name and intro] ...
Maurice Sendak, children’s writer, rests his arm comfortably on Max’s crown When I heard yesterday that Maurice Sendak, author of what has lately become a legend of sorts in the genre of children’s literature, Where the Wild Things Are, had passed away at the age of 83, I felt very sad. I tried to explain it to my friend, who ...
I was reared and raised by feminists – men and women both – so I’ve always had a pretty simple relationship with the idea. Needless to say I’m always a little shocked to find young women that, for one reason or another, reject the idea. I contributed a small piece to the new issue of Options, published online by Women and Media Collective.
Material from a social media campaign done for the Global Day of Action for Safe Abortions (ENGLISH / SINHALA / TAMIL available) (Published originally here on Groundviews on 01 October 2017) At this moment in Sri Lanka, ‘the abortion debate’ has sprung up once again; with the cabinet purportedly attempting to pass a bill which would legalize abortions for women ...
In this interview, the author speaks with Queer Sex Workers Initiative for Refugees: a Nairobi-based grassroots service-provision and advocacy group formed by queer refugees in Kenya who are engaged in sex work. The interview explores the question of how queer identity experiences interact with the policing of borders, labour issues, and refugee status. It teases out the ramifications of the ...
This article explores the engagement of feminists in Sri Lanka with the question of pornography. The article looks at some of the ways in which feminist scholars in Sri Lanka have written about sexuality, sex work and freedom of expression, as a way of engaging with the gaps and nuances in Lankan feminist discourse and debate, if any, about ...
(This was written as a Creative Writing exercise, in writing personal histories. This piece is about my relationship with my mother, Sunila Abeysekera, who was a renowned women’s and human rights activist. She died in September 2013; importantly, this is also about my relationship with her death.) Invoking I’ve found it’s easiest to invoke my mother’s spirit when my ...
The famous image was used to promote feminism in the 1980s but was originally drawn to be used as WWII propaganda. I watched an episode of Oprah Winfrey once about dolphin conservation; she said saving dolphins was important because dolphins had been known to rescue humans. It made me so angry, and was another brick in the wall of my ...
I posted this essay from Al-Jazeera English to my Facebook profile today. I understand what it’s like to belong to a nation at the receiving end of boycotts and I know I felt very frustrated and angry about it — to feel that to boycott was to reduce an entire nation of people in a single act, with a ...
This post has been a long time coming. It has taken many shapes and been many versions of itself. Now I am back home in Sri Lanka, where all the nuances of our lives in this place and belonging to this place somehow pull and tug simultaneously, I think it’s time to say it out loud. Over the last ...
South Asian Feminists, 1986 Today, on the day I leave India, I thought it would be nice to share this picture, which was shared via my mother’s friends on Facebook a few days ago. This is the great South Asian feminist sisterhood, as we know it, circa 1986. My amazing mother Sunila Abeysekera, wears possibly biggest smile in the ...
Brenda Chirino, one of hundreds that gathered at the Metro Wellness Center in Ybor City, attends a candlelight vigil to honor the victims of the nightclub shooting in Orlando, Fla., Sunday, June 12, 2016. Tampa Police momentarily shut down a portion of 7th avenue to accommodate the large crowd. (Luis Santana/Tampa Bay Times via AP) What do cases like the ...
In Sri Lanka, abortion continues to be a criminal offence under the Penal Code of 1883. Several attempts have been made to challenge the colonial-era law since the 1990s with no success thus far. This study documents and centres the knowledge of women and transpersons in accessing abortion and sexual health and reproductive health services in Sri Lanka in order ...
Mahinda Rajapakse; via Groundviews, via The Daily Beast. Originally published on Groundviews on January 12th, 2015. So you see, democracy is not just a system, a structure; it is also a feeling. It is a feeling within each one of us; a desire to be led, a desire to be led by the things we believe in and the people ...
Posted originally on Instagram (@subha.w). Sometimes, a girl has to buy herself flowers, the smell of them will fill the house, she will like looking at them, she will take pride in arranging them, she will like how they light up the lonely kitchen, how the morning sun falls on each mysterious petal, And while, like her mother before her, ...
(A Jungle Healing was originally written for and published in the UK magazine So It Goes, in April 2015. It was a collaboration with Cassie Machado, a British-Sri Lankan artist, whose images the original article was printed with, when they appeared in the magazine. The title, A Jungle Healing, was taken from R Cheran’s poem, of which excerpts appear here, ...
Published on Groundviews. On April 2016, two 19 year-old women were fatally hit by a train while attempting to cross a railway track in Dehiwala. The tragic incident quickly attracted the attention of the media, and journalists from every major domestic media outlet reported the incident, bringing to the nation and the world images and stories about the “tragic ...
‘This episode examines why we need to reimagine prevailing ideas around consent, pleasure and danger as embedded in our laws, social norms, and feminist movement politics. The discussion explores why pleasure needs to be moved from the margins of feminist agendas to be viewed as integral to dismantling patriarchy; why the connections between pleasure and danger must be rethought; ...
Emma Watson, at the UN A young, educated, privileged, white woman-celebrity gets appointed a UN Women Goodwill Ambassador six months ago (UN Women is the United Nations organisation that works with women’s rights and issues). At the UN General Assembly, to launch a UN Women campaign on gender equality, this celebrity spokesperson, the Goodwill Ambassador, is asked to make a ...
From their website. I am very skeptical about testimonial-based works of art, particularly performances. I haven’t seen or read many testimonial-based plays or ‘verbatim’ shows that haven’t left me squirming and cringing in their wake — usually because they are melodramatic, over-acted, full of unmitigated angst and hardly ever provide any real interpretation or analysis. Lately, I have been personally ...
